Being an engineer, and thus burdened with this irrational urge towards excessive precision, I should preface this screed with the statement that my main exposure to progressives is The Daily Kos Spam mail, so perhaps it’s atypical. But, well, consider this representative paragraph:
While this is the common thought process of the red-faced American bunker dweller, it is not normal logic for any supposedly functioning member of society. The man remains paranoid and only barely hinged, and we cannot suppose his behavior will improve as the pressures of the office continue to rapidly mount. He might indeed fire the special counsel; he might institute a brand new war just to bask in the praise of his generals. There are no limits, and no external Republican forces willing to rein the lunatic in if he were to do any of those lunatic things.
It’s insulting – not only to Trump, which I don’t mind, but also to their fellow Americans. It’s callow, condescending, pretentious, and fairly much designed to ensure their agenda, their plan for America, is viewed with distaste, even outright loathing, by anyone not in their little tribe.
You worry about our future robot overlords? Given the attitude of the progressives, I’d say the conservative’s worry about future Progressive overlords is nothing to dismiss. There is a certain know-it-all attitude that was brought to a sharp point by my recent post concerning Professor Steinberg’s desire to teach ethics and wisdom, because they strike me as smart people – but not necessarily wise people.
I do read selected articles from The Daily Kos Spam, not because I agree or disagree with their opinions, but mainly for topics that might interest me. Rarely are they worth quoting; I’m actually more likely to wash myself afterwards. And these are folks for whom I could sympathize – because their arguments, stripped of their withering condescension, often make good sense.
On a related note, I’ve been meditating on this article by Nick Hanauer in Business Insider for about a month now. Note this guy’s attitude right from the get-go:
From the fear-mongering headlines marking passage of $15 statutes in New York and California, you would think nobody ever dared raise the minimum wage before.
“Raising minimum wage risky,” the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader tersely warned.
“Raising minimum wage hurts low-skill workers,” the Detroit News bluntly declared.
“Even left-leaning economists say it’s a gamble,” Vox solemnly cautioned.
Nonsense. We have been raising the minimum wage for 78 years, and as a new study clearly reveals, 78 years of minimum-wage hikes have produced zero evidence of the “job-killing” consequences these headline writers want us to fear.
In a first-of-its-kind report, researchers at the National Employment Law Project pore over employment data…
I don’t know the precise political position of Hanauer – so I shan’t lump him in with the callow progressives. But he’s definitely out to score political points on our conservative siblings and up the resentment quotient, not to win an argument. Why do I say that? I mean, we can always say that by winning, we mean we’ve vanquished the enemy, driven him from his lands, burned his crops, and raped his women and children. Right?
But we’re not having an argument with an evil enemy, we’re having this argument with our fellow citizens. These are our fellow taxpayers, the folks who grow the food we eat, drive the trucks, invent new medications, doctor our wounds, and run our clothing stores. They’re not our fucking enemies.
And, having read Libertarian rags for 30 years, I know somewhat how the argument runs – this isn’t just some vague theological gesturing, the economic case is built on reasoning concerning how businesses, faced with higher labor costs, will reallocate resources and classify tasks. Some tasks will be moved from the maybe necessary category to the unnecessary category, and management will work to drive productivity even higher, and thus jobs will be lost.
It’s an understandable argument, even for non-economists like me. I’ll bet it makes a lot of sense to businessmen, especially those who think that being a businessman makes them an economics expert.
So when Hanauer uses this new study, a “first-of-its-kind report,” as a war club to beat up a position with which he disagrees, I’ll tell you I very deliberately picked war club as a metaphor. There will be no quarter in the war Hanauer wants to fight.
And that’s the problem – going to war with the other side. Losers in America are rarely appreciative of being losers. They brim with resentment, with grudges, with a sullen, hidden vengeful attitude.
Worse yet, today we have a GOP that should be incandescent with pride over controlling the government – but is instead showing itself to be incompetent in all but one respect – getting itself elected. It can’t govern, it can’t formulate a governing philosophy, write competent bills, or damn near anything else (did they win the Congressional baseball game?). The Party faithful are having their faces rubbed in their leaders’ absolute failures.
And then having some dolt call their economic reasoning idiotic to their faces?
Resentment will just reign supreme. We’ve had to deal with that since at least the Civil War. It’s not been pretty.
Let me be clear: I am separating the message from the messenger. If the conclusions of the study are confirmed, which is another point which bears noting, then I think that’s fascinating. But this sort of finding shouldn’t be used to call someone else an idiot. It’s unproductive. We’re all in this together, folks, and we should be working together on understanding how economics works. It’s not enough to say that the guys with degrees are working on it, because this is a science that impacts all of us. And, as we should all know, the GOP is currently not even paying attention to experts – only to ideology. Therefore, new knowledge like this should be integrated with the common (and academic) understanding of economics, that understanding that many folks share concerning the dismal science, and shown how it overrides or swamps the reasoning I mentioned above.
It’s commonly understood that getting knifed in the back leads to hurt feelings, but getting knifed in the front generally also leads to hurt feelings. Delivering a superior argument requires neither, though – just a mature messenger.
